Building suspense in a novel or non-fiction book is largely all about the meting out of information, telling the reader just enough to string her or him along without giving the plot away. The tendency – if our clients are anything to go by – is to tell too much. Novice writers sometimes think readers […]

Recently through another blog, we came across the following web site: http://www.randomhouse.com/kvpa/egan/ Accompanied by some creepily contemplative music, the site opens to the depiction of a castle with blinking yellow windows backed by a billow of clouds. Across the keep is written “Hotel” and the viewer understands that the site is promoting a hotel called […]

Visiting a good friend last week, we went to see the 1976 Clint Eastwood movie, The Outlaw Josey Wales. It was retro Wednesday at the 1909 opera house in the small town where she lives. The movie – with an outlaw hero and the Redlegs, an adjunct of the Union Army, in pursuit – is […]

“What does it take to persuade–to move people from one position to another, or to get them to care about an issue that has never stirred their interest? How do you get a critical mass of people to believe that a dispute affects their visions of themselves as individuals and the world in which they […]

How often, we caution our clients to avoid obvious cliché and find new ways of saying things. Now, it turns out that the “new” ways writers find to say things may just be accepted novel-speak, what word expert Ben Zimmer calls the “jargon of the novel’ in this week’s New York Times Book Review. Zimmer, […]